Consumers today have a myriad of financial instruments available to them for conducting a consumer transaction at a point of sale. For example, as part of almost every transaction, consumers are asked to choose between any number of different payment options, including credit cards, debit cards, cash and checks. In addition, consumers commonly carry more than one of each type of these instruments which have been issued by different or even the same financial institution, such as multiple credit cards issued by different banking institutions. Furthermore, consumers may also carry instruments ancillary to consummating the transaction, such as loyalty cards or coupons which may be used in the course of a transaction. Each of these instruments has a separate physical embodiment that the consumer must carry to use. Commonly, these physical instruments are carried in a wallet or pocketbook, are attached to keychains, or are otherwise carried to facilitate use.
In a typical transaction, a consumer approaches the point of sale to purchase one or more items. The point of sale may be automated or attended by a representative of the merchant. The items to be purchased are identified to a point of sale device, such as a cash register, and the total bill of sale may be determined. At that time, the consumer may be requested to identify his means of payment. The consumer may then need to physically search his wallet for the desired payment instrument and present that instrument at the point of sale to conduct a transaction.
Recent technological advances have sought to combine the myriad of payment instruments found in a typical consumer's wallet onto a single electronic device. Essentially, these advances have sought to take advantage of the existing processing power of mobile electronic devices such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants and similar devices. The data and processing requirements for a particular payment means (e.g. credit card transaction, debit transaction, stored value transaction, etc.) are deployed onto the mobile electronic device. When the consumer seeks to utilize a particular application, the application is enabled on the mobile electronic device and conducts the transaction with a point of sale terminal.
Mobile electronic devices enabled to engage in financial transactions may be equally effective in any transfer of data, whether related to financial transactions or not. Thus, the applications deployed on such devices have expanded to include business-to-business exchanges and peer-to-peer exchanges. Importantly, communications between the mobile electronic device and the point of sale terminal (in the case of consumer financial transactions) or a second electronic device (in the case of business to business, peer to peer and other transactions) may be conducted in a wireless environment.
As more applications are deployed on a mobile electronic device, a need exists to manage the deployed applications. Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for managing the deployed applications on a mobile electronic device which allows the user of the device to select an application from all deployed applications, regardless of the service provider which deployed the application.
Furthermore, the user should be able to add and remove applications from the device easily and effectively.
The present disclosure, including the appended claims, is directed to solving one or more of these problems.